Oracle reported its third-quarter earnings yesterday, with some good news on its Linux front (and good news overall). Clearly, Oracle's move to consolidate the known universe of software is paying off, and it's doing a good job of integrating PeopleSoft and its other acquisitions into the Oracle fold. Despite announcing that Yahoo! has left Red Hat for Oracle, however, the jury on its Linux business is still out Oracle reported its third-quarter earnings yesterday, with some good news on its Linux front (and good news overall). Clearly, Oracle’s move to consolidate the known universe of software is paying off, and it’s doing a good job of integrating PeopleSoft and its other acquisitions into the Oracle fold.Despite announcing that Yahoo! has left Red Hat for Oracle, however, the jury on its Linux business is still out, as Matthew Aslett writes. Oracle recognizes this: “We’re not going to build a Linux business overnight,” suggested Larry Ellison. And it’s likely that some of its other customer wins are more significant than Yahoo! Most companies simply won’t serve as reference customers, and I’m sure that’s true for Oracle, as well. The Yahoo! win is not a significant win, in my view. It has decent PR value, but I suspect it’s not a big financial loss for Red Hat. Yahoo! is like Google in its IT makeup. Google is, or was, also a Red Hat customer, but high-end geek shops like Google don’t spend a lot for commercial Linux – they may start with a copy of Red Hat, but they hack it into their own. They support themselves. That said, this move isn’t a loss at all for Red Hat, since despite Oracle’s claim, Yahoo! continues to use Red Hat:Red Hat and Yahoo both said that Red Hat hasn’t been kicked out of the account, though.“Our current infrastructure leverages both Red Hat and Oracle Linux products,” Laurie Mann, Yahoo’s vice president of engineering, said in a statement. And Red Hat spokeswoman Leigh Day added, “Red Hat and Yahoo continue to enjoy a fruitful relationship.”This reminds me of when Novell announced its big deals with Credit Suisse et al: you know, the ones where Novell agreed to give these companies software for free for years to existing customers in exchange for a press mention, and the companies that were using Red Hat kept using Red Hat.Still, I’m still left wondering why Oracle doesn’t simply adopt a Linux distribution that it could truly call its own. Why not Ubuntu? It’s one of the best distributions out there – it may trail Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SUSE, but it’s very popular, and Oracle could give it a huge uplift. (Stephen Shankland has reported before that Oracle might move to Ubuntu, though it ended up trying with Red Hat.) Why not? It makes a lot more sense (except if you put pure spite into the equation, which I think does suggest one primary reason that Oracle chose to go after RHEL). No need to fork RHEL and try to outsupport Red Hat (which Oracle will never and can never do, as it contributes a negligible fraction of the Linux kernel, compared to Red Hat). No need to do anything more than provide an exceptional product to customers, which is what Oracle suggests it wants to do.Why not Ubuntu, Oracle? Open Source